William S Burroughs Hub

Marcus Ewert — the openly gay, cisgender author whose childrens’ book 10,000 Dresses got him nominated for a Lambda Literary award — recently spoke to Vocativ.com about losing his virginity to Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (pictured with Ewert above) and having an eight-year relationship with "the king of postmodern literature" William Burroughs.

The 43-year-old Ewert told Vocativ about his infatuation with the two men and how he bedded them both when he was 17 and 18 years old:

“Allen and Burroughs were still alive and they were both gay, and in their work it was pretty explicit that they liked teenage boys. Allen has all these poems about sleeping with boys in Naropa, which is where I realized I could go to meet them. So, I was like, Perfect, I know what to do. …Allen and Burroughs teach there? You don’t have to tell me twice.”

After hitting on Ginsberg at a party, the two men dined together and then discussed Ewert’s sexual identity. After classes later on, Ewert returned to Ginsburg’s residence:

… Ewert arrived and was led (by Ginsberg) to the upstairs bedroom. Though he’d fooled around with one or two neighborhood kids when he was 12 or 13, it would be his first “adult” time; this underage boy direct from the Bible Belt was about to lose his virginity to a much older Allen Ginsberg. “I was happy to find that I saw him handsome in a certain light,” he says. “I was never super physically attracted to him, but he’s got this Grecian, bearded Poseidon profile, you know? That’s kind of handsome, I think I can go with that.

Kill Your Darlings, the indie flick in which Daniel Radcliffe plays a young Allen Ginsberg exploring his sexuality, premiered at Sundance last night. And, yes, of much of the post-show chatter dealt with Radcliffe's on-screen gay romances.

Speaking with E! after the show, Radcliffe said that while on-set gay sex was new for him, director John Krokidas gave him a blow-by-blow about how it all goes down.

"We shot that whole scene in maybe an hour and a half so it was incredibly fast-paced. I didn't really have time to stop to think and worry about it." Radcliffe said about breaking into unfamiliar sexual territory. "John was very helpful in furnishing me with a lot of graphic detail of what I would be experiencing at the various stages."

Though Kill Your Darlings, which also stars Jack Huston as Jack Kerouac, Ben Foster as William Burroughs and Michael C. Hall as David Kammerer, a man whose murder provides the movie's dramatic pivot, has yet to find a distributor, the amount of attention and generally positive reviews - The Hollywood reporter wrote, in part, "there’s a limber, freewheeling aspect to the storytelling that echoes the rule-breaking literary form of the Beat writers" - and Radcliffe's star power should be enough to guarantee at least a small showing around the country.

AFTER THE JUMP, Radcliffe, Krokidas and the rest of the film's core cast talk with THR about making the film and what the gay men they portray mean to American culture.